This hasn't been my experience; I see much higher sequential read results compared to random reads on a wide range of storage from low-end home PC SSDs to high end NVME flash storage in large servers.

It's certainly not true on actual hard drives, and never has been. A seek is around 10ms.

By what metric? I think this is close to true for identical blocksizes, but most benchmarks test sequential transfers with large 1M blocks and random ones with small 4K blocks. In this case, the speed of the fastest NVME drives is more than double for sequential transfers than it is for random ones.

I don't like comparing the two, they're completely different workloads and it's better IMO to look at the IOPS for random transfers, which is where newer, faster SSDs truly excel, and where most people "notice" the performance.